LTE coverage improvement by TTI bundling

Riikka Susitaival
Ericsson Research, NomadicLab, Finland
riikka.susitaival@ericsson.com
Michael Meyer
Ericsson Research, Aachen, Germany
michael.meyer@ericsson.com


Abstract Compared to WCDMA, the LTE radio access has a
significantly shorter Transmission Time Interval (TTI) in order
to reduce end-to-end delays. However, if a User Equipment (UE)
at the cell edge is limited by its available transmission power, it
may not be able to transmit an entire VoIP packet during one
TTI, since the instantaneous source data rate is too high. Thus
TTI bundling has been recently introduced as a feature of LTE
Rel. 8 to improve the uplink coverage. In TTI bundling, a VoIP
packet is transmitted as a single PDU during a bundle of sub-
sequent TTIs without waiting for the HARQ feedback. HARQ
feedback is only expected for the last transmission of the bundle.
This paper studies TTI bundling and compares it to the
conventional RLC segmentation. The simulation results indicate
that TTI bundling provides a gain of more than 4 dB in terms of
the sustainable path loss.
Keywords- LTE, VoIP, coverage, HARQ
I. INTRODUCTION
The Long Term Evolution (LTE) radio access has been
standardized by 3GPP. The requirement has been to provide
high data rates for end users with low latency and good QoS
[1][2]. The key facilitator for low delays has been the
introduction of a short TTI of only 1 ms, which enables short
Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) round trip times
(RTT) of 8 ms. However, having such a short TTI can be
problematic when the user is at the cell border and has limited
transmission power: Even for a small Voice Over IP (VoIP)
packet it cannot spend enough energy during one TTI in order
to achieve a successful (with a certain probability)
transmission. For example, transmitting a VoIP packet of 33
bytes within 1 ms results (including L1/L2 overhead) in a data
rate of 312 kbit/s which might be difficult to sustain at the cell
edge. Thus, it is likely that HARQ retransmissions are required
inducing additional 8 ms delay per retransmission. Many
retransmissions lead to long delays, which can be intolerable as
delay sensitive applications as VoIP are considered.
The conventional solution to reduce delays and improve the
coverage is to segment RLC SDUs and transmit those seg-
ments in consecutive TTIs. However, segmentation increases
overhead, control signaling and vulnerability to packet loss due
to HARQ feedback errors.
An alternative solution to segmentation is to bundle a set of
TTIs for a certain UE. The idea is that a fixed number of
transmissions of a given transport block is done in consecutive
TTIs without waiting for the HARQ feedback. Only when the
receiver has decoded the whole bundle of transmissions, it
sends the corresponding HARQ feedback. This approach
reduces the number of required HARQ feedback messages
significantly. In addition, the header overhead as well as the
signaling overhead resulting from uplink grants is reduced.
In this paper we first discuss the problems of the two
traditional concepts: solely relying on HARQ retransmissions
or using RLC segmentation. Then we introduce TTI bundling
as an approach to improve the coverage of the LTE radio
access. The TTI bundling method in uplink was originally
presented to 3GPP in [3] and has in the meanwhile been
included as a feature of LTE Rel. 8. In this paper the concept is
evaluated in more detail. By dynamic radio network
simulations we compare the performance of the TTI bundling
and segmentation approaches for VoIP traffic. The VoIP
capacity of the LTE uplink is earlier studied in many papers,
such as [6][7], but the coverage issue discussed in this paper
has received little attention. The discussion in this paper
concentrates on the LTE FDD operation, while TTI bundling
has been defined for TDD operation as well.
This paper is organized as follows: In Section II we discuss
the two conventional approaches based on HARQ
retransmissions and segmentation. Also the limitations of those
concepts for UEs at the cell edge are provided. As a solution to
improve the coverage we describe TTI bundling in Section III.
In Section IV we study different scheduling strategies of the
bundled users. Section V compares the performance of
segmentation and bundling by simulations. Finally, Section VI
provides a short conclusion.
II. SOLUTIONS TO IMPROVE UPLINK COVERAGE
As mentioned in the introduction, during the TTI of 1 ms
the UE may not be able to accumulate enough energy so that
even a small VoIP packet can be received correctly by the
evolved NodeB (eNB). The conventional solutions to the
problem are HARQ retransmissions or segmentation of higher
layer Protocol Data Units (PDUs) into smaller units or a
combination of these two concepts. These approaches and
drawbacks of them are discussed next.
A. HARQ Retransmissions
HARQ is an error correction mechanism and applied at the
LTE Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. The idea is that
each user has multiple parallel stop-and-wait processes: When
waiting for an ACK/NACK feedback of one process, other
transport blocks are sent using other processes. By this
approach the throughput of the link is maximized. In addition,
only a single bit HARQ feedback signal is needed instead of
feedback messages containing sequence numbers as in case of
a window-based protocol.
978-1-4244-2517-4/09/$20.00 2009 IEEE 1
The number of parallel HARQ processes depends on the
HARQ RTT. Taking transmission, reception, and processing
delays into account, it can be calculated that the retransmission
of the transport block is possible 8 ms after the previous
transmission. Thus, the number of parallel HARQ processes is
also set to 8 in LTE. In the uplink direction of LTE,
synchronous HARQ is used, meaning that if there is a
retransmission of the transport block, it occurs exactly 8 ms
after the previous transmission.


Figure 1. Transmitting an RLC SDU as a single RLC PDU and
corresponding transport block with hybrid ARQ.

In Figure 1 the transmission of a VoIP packet as a single
RLC PDU is illustrated. The first transmission of the transport
block resulting from the considered VoIP packet occurs at TTI
# 0. The HARQ feedback occurs 4 ms and the retransmission 8
ms after the initial transmission. In the example three HARQ
transmissions are required before the decoding of the transport
block is successful. If the UE is at the edge of the cell, the
number of retransmissions can be even higher leading to too
long delays as regard to VoIP traffic. The QoS requirements
for VoIP traffic over a one-way radio link can be assumed to be
the followings: The delay should not exceed 50 ms and residual
packet error rate should be under 1% [8].
B. RLC segmentation
The LTE Radio Link Control (RLC) protocol is responsible
for segmentation and concatenation of higher layer PDUs, i.e.,
Packet Data Convergence Protocol (PDCP) PDUs, to suitably
sized RLC PDUs. It is also responsible for in-sequence
delivery of RLC SDUs to upper layers. There are different
operation modes in RLC; in Acknowledged Mode (AM)
retransmissions of missing PDUs are done by a second ARQ
protocol in RLC, but in Unacknowledged Mode (UM) only in-
sequence delivery is provided without retransmissions. The
latter approach is suitable for VoIP traffic where short delays
are more stringent compared to the packet loss requirement.
A straightforward concept to improve the LTE uplink
coverage is to segment RLC SDUs into several smaller units.
Due to stronger coding, it is more likely that smaller transport
blocks can be decoded correctly. Thus, retransmissions are
required less frequently, resulting in less delay. As an example,
in Figure 2 the RLC SDU resulting from a VoIP packet is
segmented into 4 RLC PDUs and transmitted in parallel in four
different HARQ processes. By this approach the delay is
shorter than when having only pure HARQ retransmissions as
depicted in the previous subsection.


Figure 2. Segmenting an RLC SDU into RLC PDUs and transmission of
corresponding transport blocks with hybrid ARQ.
However, the segmentation approach has some drawbacks
especially when used in poor radio conditions:
1. Overhead: Let us assume a typical VoIP packet including
36 bytes for the voice frame and the compressed
RTP/UDP/IP header [5]. The combined RLC/MAC header
is assumed to be 3 bytes and the CRC overhead also 3 bytes
[2]. As shown in Table 2, if the number of RLC PDUs per
VoIP packet is increased from 1 to 8, the L2/L1 overhead
increases from 14% to 55%.
2. Control signalling load: Each transmitted RLC PDU
requires a separate control message carried on the Physical
Data Control Channel (PDCCH) to grant the uplink
resources. In addition, possible HARQ retransmissions need
to be granted, too. A high number of segments as well as
retransmissions lead to high load on the PDCCH.
3. HARQ feedback errors: Each HARQ transmission is
followed by a downlink HARQ feedback signal. Assuming
RLC UM, a VoIP packet loss can occur when a HARQ
NACK is interpreted as an ACK. This may result in a
significant packet loss rate. For example, if 12 (re-
)transmissions for a transport block are required and the
NACK-to-ACK error probability is 0.1%, the probability to
stop retransmissions too early due to a HARQ feedback
error is 1-(1-0.001)
12
1.2%, which is too high for VoIP.

TABLE I. SIZE OF VOIP PACKETS WITH DIFFERENT SEGMENT SIZES
Segments
Transport
block size
CRC
bits
All
bytes
Amount of
overhead
1 36 + 3 3 42 14 %
2 18 + 3 3 48 25 %
4 9 + 3 3 60 40 %
8 5 + 3 3 88 55 %
2
III. TTI BUNDLING
An alternative approach to pure HARQ retransmissions or
RLC segmentation is a method named TTI Bundling. Instead of
segmenting the RLC SDU into smaller units at the RLC layer,
in this approach several redundancy versions (RVs)
corresponding to the entire RLC SDU are transmitted in
consecutive TTIs. Only when the last redundancy version of
the transport block is received by the eNB, the HARQ
feedback is sent.


Figure 3. TTI Bundling of 4 TTIs
Figure 3 shows the TTI bundling solution adopted in 3GPP
Specifications [4] and [5] for FDD. In the standard, the bundle
size has been fixed to 4 transmissions. That means, 4
redundancy versions of the transport block resulting from a
single RLC SDU are transmitted in consecutive TTIs with
HARQ process number 0. After all 4 transmissions have been
received and decoded by the eNB, the HARQ feedback is sent.
Assuming 1 ms delay for transmission and 3 ms delay for
decoding and processing, this feedback is possible in TTI # 7.
After the UE has received the feedback, assuming again 3 ms
for processing, the earliest retransmission by the UE is possible
in TTI # 11. Thus, the shortest HARQ RTT with the bundle
size of 4 would thus be 11 ms. However, the HARQ RTT of 11
ms cannot be synchronized with the 8 ms normal LTE HARQ
RTT (compare Figure 1), because the retransmissions of the
normal processes and the bundled processes using the same
physical resource blocks would collide when non-adaptive
retransmissions are applied. For that reason, in 3GPP it has
been agreed that the retransmission of the bundle is delayed
until the 16
th
TTI. The time slots in between can be used for
some other bundled HARQ processes from the given UE or
other UEs using TTI bundling. Also part of TTIs can be used
for normal HARQ processes of other UEs as will be explained
in Section IV.
TTI bundling has several advantages compared to the RLC
segmentation approach:
1. Uplink resources over multiple TTIs can be assigned with a
single grant, which decreases the signaling overhead. To
trigger a transmission of a TTI bundle, the same grant format
can be used as for ordinary HARQ transmissions. Whether
the UE should transmit a single TTI or a TTI bundle, is
configured by the Radio Resource Control (RRC) protocol.
A UE can be configured to use either normal HARQ
operation or TTI bundling.
2. There is only one HARQ feedback message per bundle. This
decreases control signaling and the vulnerability to NACK-
to-ACK errors that can lead to data loss.
3. Because RLC SDUs are not segmented, the overhead
resulting from RLC and MAC headers as well as CRC is
decreased leading to a more efficient use of radio resources.
A side effect of TTI bundling is that the granularity to
match the number of transmissions exactly to required amount
(i.e., the early termination gain) decreases. With segmentation,
when a single segment is decoded, retransmissions of that
segment can be stopped. For TTI bundling always a bundle of
retransmissions is done. For that reason TTI bundling should
be used only for the UEs that are at the cell edge.
IV. SCHEDULING OF BUNDLES

In normal FDD operation of LTE, allocation and granting
of physical resources are done once per TTI. When TTI
bundling is configured for a given user, the transmission grant
is valid during the whole bundle of TTIs. For this reason, every
time when the transmission of a new transport block is
scheduled, it has to be checked that any transmission of the
new bundle does not collide with the retransmissions of the
existing bundle.
Considering a single user, it is obvious that transmission of
only one transport block per TTI is possible and collision
occurs if the retransmissions of an old process occur at the
same time that the transmission of a new bundle. This is
illustrated in Figure 4: A new bundle of the considered user can
not be scheduled to start from TTI #13 to TTI #15, because the
transmission of the new bundle would collide with the
retransmission of the existing bundle 1.
When there are multiple users in the system, a collision can
occur if different users are allocated to the same frequencies
(i.e., subbands) at the same time. Again in Figure 4, another
bundled user cannot be scheduled from TTI #13 to TTI #15 to
the same frequencies as the existing process already uses.
Similarly, another UE using the normal HARQ operation with
8 ms HARQ RTT cannot be scheduled during TTI #8 - TTI
#11 on the frequencies of bundle 1 because the transmissions
and retransmissions of these two UEs would collide.
Despite of the above mentioned restrictions, there still
remains some flexibility in scheduling in the time domain of a
single user or in scheduling in the time and frequency domain
of all users. Here two of approaches are explained:


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Figure 4. Scheduling of the resource blocks for a single or many users
Synchronous scheduling. In this strategy the transmission
times of all bundles are synchronized. As depicted by dotted
blocks in Figure 4 this would mean that a new bundle could
be scheduled to start every 4
th
TTI, that is, in TTIs #4, #8 or
#12 in the figure. The benefit of this approach is that
scheduling is more straightforward and we can fill the time
domain with bundles if the traffic load of the network is
high.
Non-synchronous scheduling: In this strategy we can
schedule new bundles or normal processes whenever there
will not be any collision as explained below. As a result, the
bundled processes and normal processes are arbitrary mixed.
This approach decreases the access delay but efficient
allocation of resources is more complicated as compared to
the synchronous strategy.
V. SIMULATION RESULTS
In this section we compare the performance of pure HARQ
retransmissions, segmentation and TTI bundling for VoIP
traffic at the cell edge. The simulations are done by a dynamic
network simulator developed by Ericsson. In the simulation
scenario all generated users are located at the cell border and
have a constant path loss. On top of the fixed path loss a fast
fading model reflecting an ITU3 channel is used.
We assume a simple VoIP traffic model where only uplink
traffic from a UE to the eNB is generated. Our assumption is
that the client in the terminal side talks all time during its call
and SID frames are ignored. The transport block sizes used for
VoIP packets with different segmentation approaches are given
in Table 1. The QoS requirements for the VoIP application are
set as follows: the user is satisfied if the delay does not exceed
60 ms and the residual packet loss is below 1 %. All packets
exceeding the delay bound are considered as lost.
There are some simplifications used in the simulation
study. First, scheduling requests are not used. Instead, it is
assumed that the eNB knows perfectly the buffer status of the
UE. In addition, the scheduling is kept as simple as possible: If
there is data available, the number of allocated subbands, i.e.
15 kHz sub-carriers, is fixed to 3.
Although in the LTE standard the bundle size is fixed to 4,
in this section we study also alternative options such as bundle
size of 8. However, the bundle size does not change
dynamically but remains fixed in each simulation scenario.
A. User satisfaction with a perfect feedback channel
In Figure 5 the share of satisfied VoIP users is plotted as a
function of the normalized path loss for the different
segmentation and bundling approaches. In the scenario there is
a single user at a time in the system but the results are averaged
over 200 users. We can see that the sustainable path loss
difference between pure HARQ transmissions and other
approaches is significant, 2-3 dB. When segmentation of a
VoIP packet into 4 and 8 segments are compared, these two
approaches give almost the same results. This is explained by
the fact that the benefit from the delay reduction when using 8
segments is lost due to an increase in overhead.
When 4 segments and bundling over 4 ms are compared,
also in this case the performance is similar. An explanation for
this is that due to tight delay requirements for VoIP traffic, the
maximum number of retransmissions without bundling remains
as 8. If a VoIP packet arrives every 20th ms, 12 free TTIs
still exist before the UE is power-limited. Those TTIs can be
used to increase the code rate by segmentation. Finally, when
transmissions are bundled over 8 ms, the gain of 1 dB is
achieved when compared to other approaches.

Figure 5. User satisfaction as a function of the normalized average path loss,
error-free PHICH.

B. User satisfaction with NACK-ACK errors
In LTE, HARQ feedback messages of uplink data traffic
are carried in the Physical Hybrid-ARQ Indicator Channel
(PHICH). The 3GPP target for the probability that an ACK is
4
misinterpreted as NACK is 10
-2
and that a NACK is
misinterpreted as ACK is in the range of 10
-3
to 10
-4
. In
practice, if there is an ACK-to-NACK error, the UE sends
some unnecessary retransmissions, which consumes some extra
resources. However, a NACK-to-ACK error is more critical,
since the HARQ transmitter terminates the (re-)transmissions.
In the case of RLC UM the whole VoIP packet will be lost.
One option to recover from NACK-to-ACK error is that the
eNB tries to detect if the UE has not transmitted anything. If
not, the eNB invokes a retransmission. However, this kind of
recovery mechanism brings additional complexity to the eNB
and the scheduler and is not assumed in this paper.

Figure 6. User satisfaction as a function of the normalized average path loss
of the link, PHICH NACK-to-ACK error probability 0.1%.
In Figure 6 the user satisfaction is plotted when the ACK-
to-NACK error probability is set to 0.1%. We can see that the
user satisfaction is much lower than with the perfect feedback
channel. When TTI bundling is used, the overhead and the
number of HARQ feedback messages are independent of the
bundle size. Thus, with bundling over 4 ms we can achieve 4
dB and bundling over 8 ms even 6 dB improvement in
coverage as compared to segmentation.
C. Resource usage with different approaches
Although the uplink coverage improvement has been the main
objective when developing the TTI bundling concept, it is also
important to minimize the used resources. Thus, in Figure 7
the average number of used resource blocks per transmitted
VoIP packet as a function of the path loss is shown. When the
link quality is reasonably good, segmentation and bundling
over 4 or 8 TTIs use the same amount of resources. However,
when the path loss increases, the resource usage of TTI
bundling is remarkably lower, which can mainly be explained
by the smaller overhead. On the other hand, the resource usage
of the bundle over 4 ms is significantly smaller than that of the
bundle over 8 ms providing thus a good tradeoff between the
coverage improvement and the capacity usage.

Figure 7. Number of used resource blocks per VoIP packet, error-free
PHICH.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper we discussed and evaluated the LTE TTI
bundling feature that aims at improving the uplink coverage.
The idea is that, instead of segmentation, bigger transport
blocks are used. By relying on incremental redundancy, HARQ
transmissions are performed in consecutive TTIs without
waiting for HARQ feedback. The HARQ receiver accumulates
the received energy of all transmissions and responds with
HARQ feedback only once after the entire bundle has been
received and evaluated. The simulation results indicate that
there is only a small benefit of TTI bundling for VoIP traffic if
the HARQ feedback channel is perfect. The gain achieved by
decreasing the overhead of segmentation is lost due to a longer
delay of TTI bundling. However, when the NACK-to-ACK
errors are taken into account, the bundling over 4 ms gives
more than 4 dB better results in terms of the sustainable path
loss with reasonable resource usage. This encourages the use of
TTI bundling.
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